Land Tenure in Archaic Sparta 135
Polybius and Plutarch were misled, they claim, by the historian Phylarchus and
by the Stoic Sphaerus of Borysthenes, who tutored Cleomenes in his youth,
later returned to Lacedaemon to advise him with regard to the agōgē ́ and the
sussıtía, and at some point wrote tracts on the Spartan regime.
There can be no doubt that Polybius and Plutarch drew on Phylarchus,
and the latter appears to have read Sphaerus as well. It is, moreover, evident
that their treatments of Agis and Cleomenes reflect in some measure what
Phylarchus reported. That Phylarchus was sympathetic to the Spartan revolu-
tion seems clear enough,^30 but the focus of his narrative was not Lacedaemon
as such. His subject was the history of Greece more generally in the period
stretching from the death of Pyrrhus of Epirus to that of Cleomenes of Sparta,
and we have no reason to think that he wrote about early Sparta at all.^31
Sphaerus did address the Lacedaemonian polıteía, and he wrote a treatise on
Lycurgus and Socrates, but there is no reason to suppose that he misrepre-
sented developments for partisan purposes. The two fragments of his work on
Sparta that do survive suggest on his part an attempt to provide a scrupulously
accurate and detailed scholarly description of the evolution of Spartan mores,
manners, and laws.^32
It is, moreover, clear that Polybius and Plutarch read as well the work of
Aratus, who was decidedly hostile to the revolutionary program developed
by these two kings; and, for Spartan institutions and their development in
the archaic and classical period, they had a host of other, earlier, more au-
thoritative sources on which to draw—including not only Xenophon, Epho-
rus, and Plato but, at least in the case of Plutarch, Aristotle’s Politics, his Polıteía
of the Lacedaemonians, as well as the works of his students Theophrastus and
Dicaearchus. That confusion entered in, that in the oral tradition concerning
eighth- and seventh-century Lacedaemon there was a telescoping and confla-
tion of developments, that Polybius and Plutarch present a simplified, overly
rational account of archaic and classical Lacedaemonian property relations
there can be no doubt. But that they were fed an elaborate line by Phylarchus,
by Sphaerus, or anyone else and fell for it hook, line, and sinker—this really is
a stretch. There surely was a connection between the tales told about Lycurgus
and the program of Agis and Cleomenes. But it makes far more sense to sup-
pose that the two kings were inspired by a mildly confused, overly schematic,
simplified, but more or less accurate account of the shape things took in Lace-
daemon’s heyday than to believe, as these scholars do, that the Sparta these
two kings sought to restore was nothing more than a figment of the historical